


Just This Once

by lovelornity



Category: Lost
Genre: F/M, Gap Filler
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2020-07-30 16:02:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20099866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovelornity/pseuds/lovelornity
Summary: Sawyer and Kate go on a date. Of sorts. 3x17 Gapfiller, picks up the day Sawyer gives Kate the mixtape.Prompt: "Good enough."





	Just This Once

**Author's Note:**

> Originally published February 23, 2008.
> 
> _Original Notes:_ This sat unfinished on my computer for almost a year, but Eggtown finally gave me the inspiration to just finish it already.

Alaska. If he ever made it off this shithole hell of an island, that is where he would go. Some place with weather like a permanent air conditioner. Half-frozen tundra was his idea of paradise now. No more of the sun and sand that was always bearing down on him from all directions, blinding his eyes and grinding its way past his clothing and into his skin. 

From his perch at the water’s edge, Sawyer had a front row seat as the sun sank further into the horizon, and the sky began to turn its usual shade of blue just before nightfall. The waves crashed furiously against the shore, drowning out the sounds of civilization down the beach. He took a swig from the can of warm Dharma beer that he had been nursing for the past quarter of an hour and grimaced. “My kingdom for an ice box,” he muttered to himself. 

Steady gusts of wind whipped his hair around his head, setting off a string of curses as he tried to brush the windblown tangles away from his eyes. 

“You need a haircut, James.”

Her voice had startled him, having spent a greater part of the day in self-imposed exile. Before he could turn around to face her, she had already sat down in the sand beside him. 

“You offerin’, Freckles?” he asked. He did not look at her, but instead cast his eyes out toward the rapidly darkening sea and sky. She replied with silence, and the two of them sat for several moments, shoulder to shoulder, without a word. 

The sun finally dipped below the heaving waters of the rising tide, and the sky around the beach glowed orange from the campfires that were scattered along the shore nearby. Sawyer took one final drink from the can of beer and crushed it in his hand as if it were made out of paper. Kate eyed the can with a look of bemusement. “Where’d you get the beer?”

“Roger Workman made a beer run,” he answered vaguely and began pulling on a piece of rope tied to a stake at his feet. A net appeared out of the water and as it neared the sand in front of them, Kate could see half a dozen white cans stamped with the Dharma logo. 

When she looked at him quizzically, he added, “He forgot the ice.”

Sawyer used the bottom of his shirt to wipe the seawater off of the top of one of the mildly chilled cans and handed it to Kate, who graciously accepted it. He watched her pop open the top and take a drink before helping himself to another. 

When their earlier silence began to make a reprise, Sawyer slowly got to his feet and, swinging his arm back, cast the net of beer back into the black water like a skipping stone. He secured the end of the rope to the post in the ground and covered it up with a fistful of sad. Beer in hand, he turned his back on Kate and started for the camp, but she stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. He could feel the heat of her palm through the cloth of his worn, cotton shirt as he turned around to confront her, his facial expression masked by the growing darkness. Even in the dim moonlight, Sawyer could make out Kate’s glistening eyes, and he stopped her before she had the chance to speak. 

“Don’t,” he breathed through clenched teeth in a manner that was somewhere between playful and wounding. “You can lie to yourself, but you ain’t gotta lie to me.” 

There was something very karmic about the situation he now found himself in. The con man, who had made a profession out of stealing women’s hearts along with their money, had somehow allowed his cold, dead heart to be resuscitated by a woman who only pretended to love him. It was fitting that this love should be so wounding— he had earned it. And so he did nothing to stop it. Rather, he invited her to have a go at his heart; and when he felt a hint of pain, of love-sick torture, he gritted his teeth and bore it like a penance, like a guilt-ridden traitor accepts the ax. 

Kate shook her head at his words and opened her mouth to speak again, but this time Sawyer silenced her with his lips. The kiss was gruff and angry and knocked the air out of Kate entirely. The can of beer she had been holding fell to the sand and created a small, foamy moat around her feet. 

It was as if he did not want her to apologize, as if he refused to believe the truth that lay behind her words, if there was any at all. He was determined to see to his own unhappiness. He had allowed her to thaw the frosty veneer he had put up for most of his life, and now he was paying for his actions. 

It did not take long for Kate’s protests to die away, and the two once again slipped into the comfortable, tangled mess of heat and flesh that simplified the complicated. As usual, it was Kate who broke apart from their fervent embrace of tongues and arms, but Sawyer grabbed her and pulled her back toward him in one rough movement. Their faces inches apart, Kate’s breath hitched in her throat as Sawyer’s hands caressed her cheek with a gentleness that betrayed the forceful way he had just wrenched her to him. His fingers traced her jaw line and down her neck, lingering on her collarbone for a moment before finally slipping off her shoulder and down to her empty hand. 

“I wanna show you somethin’.” His words came in a slow whisper and when he felt Kate’s fingers intertwine with his own, he began to walk toward the dark jungle.

The moonlight filtering through the canopy of trees overhead provided just enough light for Sawyer to find his way through the thick foliage that surrounded them. After several long minutes of walking in darkness, they arrived at a moonlit clearing that Kate recognized as having been the location of Hurley’s golf tournament what seemed like years ago. But where the valley had been empty then, save for a makeshift flag, she could now make out the contours of an old Volkswagen bus. 

“Where did that come from?” she asked in a quiet voice.

“Hurley found it,” he replied with a half-hearted smile as the memory of that day replayed in his mind. 

Sawyer led her to the passenger’s side door, savoring the creaking sound that it made as it opened. Visions of lazy childhood summers in small-town USA temporarily flooded his mind—“borrowed” cars with sticky vinyl interiors, cigarettes, and pilfered bottle rockets. Kate’s lips curled up into a smile as if she were savoring a similar memory of misspent youth, and she climbed inside, the door creaking shut behind her. 

The keys dangled from the ignition and when Sawyer sat down in the driver’s seat, he jammed them farther in with the heel of his hand and turned the keys counterclockwise. The engine did not start, but the interior of the van came to life, a guitar-heavy melody blasting out of the speakers mid-song. He leaned over to turn the volume down with a suppressed grin. “Musta missed the dance party.” 

In truth, Sawyer had hiked to the bus almost every day during Kate’s recent absence. It filled him with a sense of normalcy to be seated behind the wheel of a vehicle, albeit a hippy bus. After having been trapped on the island for going on three months and having survived kidnapping, multiple gun-shot wounds, and torture, he relished any link to life before the crash. Kate seemed to be having similar sentiments, as she settled back into the lumpy seat, her eyes lowered as if in thought. After a moment, she looked up at him with a smile. 

“Is this--?” She squinted down to look at the label on the 8-track, but it had been worn off, bleached by countless days of sunlight and humidity. 

“Three Dog Night,” he finished for her with a nod. “I never much cared for ‘em, but under the circumstances, they ain’t too bad.”

The song played on as moonlight crept onto the dashboard and the warm night air blew in through the open windows. Kate had relaxed considerably, and the sight of a genuine smile on her face snapped the tension that had been building up inside of Sawyer all day.

“You know, this feels like we’re on a date,” she teased, biting at the corner of her lower lip.

He smiled. “That was the general idea.”

“Oh really?”

His dimples deepened.

There was a small, hissed silence in the music as the track changed, and then the bus was filled with the grating sound of sappy, electric guitar and Danny Hutton’s airy falsetto. 

_“A storybook feeling about you foretells the happiness that could be.”_

Sawyer stirred abruptly in his seat and leaned forward to shut off the music. Despite the fact that he had developed the habit of sitting back on the hood of the bus, lazily draining the car’s battery and finding solace in the lyrics of some long-forgotten tune from the 1970s, schmaltzy ballads were the last thing he wanted to hear at that moment. He might as well stand outside Kate’s tent with a boom box held up over his head. 

_“So dry those brown eyes that I’m kissing, and maybe you’ll think you love me.” _

His hand was on the ignition, but Kate reached out to stop him, her hand on his, playfully pushing it away. She leaned over and kissed him through a curtain of hair—his, course and windblown; hers, soft and coiled. He felt a sudden surge of excitement as he always did when she initiated things, always in private, always hidden away from unwanted eyes. Neither here nor there, when he could feel her smile through the kisses she placed on his lips, feel her cheeks flush under his touch. It was sentimental and it was trite. But if it worked for Kate, than it worked for him.

Her fingers traveled up his face and got lost in his hair as Sawyer battled with the gaping distance between the two seats. He shifted his weight so that he could lean further into her, and she let out a soft yelp and arched her back as if an invisible ice cube were sliding down her skin. Sawyer pulled away, his lips upturned in a smile, eyebrows arched quizzically. 

Kate stood up as best she could in the low bus, reached behind her and retrieved a cassette tape from her back pocket. She tossed it onto the dashboard. Sawyer’s eyes wandered over to where it landed, to the words “The Best of Phil Collins,” and then moved back over to her. 

“What? Were you fixin’ to exchange it for somethin’ better? What you get is what you got, Freckles.”

An introspective smile flashed onto her face, but she did not respond. The van was filled with the silence of static and as the next track came on over the stereo, she leaned back in her seat and stretched her legs so that her feet dangled out the open passenger’s side window.

_“Wash away my troubles, wash away my pain with the rain in Shambala…”_

Kate looked over at Sawyer, whose eyes were still fixed on her attentively. That stare. The one he had seen mirrored in her face only once. Kate rolled her eyes to hide the blush that was rising to her freckled cheeks and smiled. 

And for Sawyer, that was good enough.


End file.
